Name: Abigail (Gail) Pena
Social Justice Group: Prisons: The Death Penalty (C)
Date of Fieldwork: February 7, 2025
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Amy Donella
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:
On February 7th, my group mates and I had a zoom interview with Amy Donella, a criminal justice lawyer. She has been in this profession for about 40 years, but has been working in her current company for 4. She gave us a lot of information about discrimination about the incarceration system.
There was one case she told us about that taught about false witness. It involved a man named William who was shot and killed; the shooter ran off. No one could really see him, but the witnesses said that he was dark skinned and 6 feet tall. One piece of evidence that the police found was a cap near the crime scene. They used forensics and found that the sweat on the cap was traced back to two different people. However, they assumed that it belonged to the person with more sweat on it. That person was innocent. Ava helped them get exonerated. In the end, they found the real culprit, and he was light skinned and 5 feet, which was VERY different than what the witnesses had said. This shows how you can’t always depend on people who claim that they witnessed something.
Ava went on to talk about some more general information about the death penalty in the U.S. For example, she told us that America is one of the only countries in the world that still use the death penalty, alongside Japan, China, and other Middle Eastern countries. There are also hundreds of people every year that are exonerated after cases that were unconstitutional. We asked her what communities are affected the most by false imprisonment, and she said that the Black community is the most affected. Recent studies have shown that most prosecutors will seek the death penalty more often when when the defendant is black than any other race.
Overall, I learned a lot from my interview, and I’m looking forward to having more meetings with her.
